Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to the field of wireless communications, including to tone mapping in wireless communications.
Background
Many wireless communication protocols modulate data using a multicarrier modulation scheme. For example, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is a common multicarrier modulation scheme. In a multicarrier modulation scheme, a wireless channel is divided into multiple tones. Each tone occupies a portion of the wireless channel bandwidth. During a transmission, data is carried over the multiple tones in parallel.
In order to schedule a transmission, a plurality of tones is grouped into resource blocks. Each resource block may contain a standard number of tones and is assigned to a specific receiver device.
In order to receive a transmission, a receiver device needs to know how the tones are mapped to the resource blocks. This tone mapping may be specified in a preamble field of a wireless frame. However, because there may be a large number of possible tone mapping combinations, the preamble field may be of large size. But the transmission of a preamble of large size may increase power consumption which may reduce battery life in a portable device. Moreover, additional compute processing may be necessary to decode a preamble of large size. This may also increase power consumption.